So this happened
This is very bad for a number of reasons. YouTube is a large part of our idea space. A lot of normies watch it and many end up coming across our (that is, the real right’s) content. YouTube is essentially a way to spread our memes that is free of the corrosive influence of the controlled media. The potential impact of this can not be understated.

I was “redpilled” through YouTube. Without it I would likely still be a naive, trend following normie. I have no doubt this is the case for many others, especially Millenials and members of Gen Z such as myself, who are new to the game and never knew a world where these ideas had any sort of traction. The damage this may do to our cause is immense. Perhaps saying that this will change the course of history is a tad hyperbolic, but we are a cultural influence now, as minor as we may be, and the neutering of one of our best propaganda outlets could very well alter this in ways we cannot yet predict.

Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy fix to these sorts of issues. It isn’t entirely YouTube’s fault, and anyone who places blame solely on them is missing a larger point. This may in fact be the inevitable result of having a monetised platform. Even if another video sharing site on par with YouTube were to pop up tomorrow, the more popular it got, the more likely it would be to face some sort of adversitiser boycott, similar to the one YouTube was on the end of.

A few months ago, you may recall that a bunch of YouTubers kicked up a rather large stink about the demonetisation that initially came as a result of advertisers withdrawing from YouTube. I thought at the time that this was an overreaction, and indeed a distraction from much worse forms of censorship that were on the horizon. It seems that my estimation was correct. It was also made clear at the time that the majority of YouTube content creators are woefully unprepared to deal with issues such as these.

Unfortunately, there really aren’t any particularly good alternatives to YouTube at the moment. Daily motion is an option, as are vidme and minds, but the problem with all of these is that the majority of normies do not use them. Anything we did on these platforms would be little more than preaching to the choir. I don’t really have a solution to this problem at the moment, but I hope that someone more intelligent than I may have some ideas that are feasible.

The big question now is, how big will the impact of this be? There are a few issues to consider. One is the fact that YouTube doesn’t seem to actually manually review any flagged material. This could lead to a situation even worse than the mass flagging that occurs on YouTube curently, guven the fact that the criteria for “isolation” are more broad. Furthermore, the article touches on YouTube’s increasing use of computer algorithms to flag videos

This opens the door to the rather scary prospect that videos could be automatically flagged and “isolated” en masse. This is a worst case scenario, but after reading through the details, it unfortunately seems more likely than we might hope. Make no mistake, this is not just demonetisation. This is active, hard censorship of dissident content on one of the platforms that is of most use to us. I can only hope that my worst case scenario doesn’t come to pass, but I’m not paricularly optimistic.